Matthew Continetti

Matthew Continetti is editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon, he was opinion editor of the Weekly Standard, where he remains a contributing editor. The author of The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine (Doubleday, 2006) and The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star (Sentinel, 2009), Continetti’s articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. A 2003 graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in history, Continetti lives in McLean, Virginia. He can be reached at comments@freebeacon.com.Email Matthew
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How rudderless is the Democratic Party? Its membership is so bereft of leadership and policy direction that 16 of its senators have signed on to a health care bill sponsored by a self-avowed independent democratic socialist from Vermont.

“Why did we lose this war?” asked James Burnham of Vietnam in 1972. One reason, he wrote, was that “We failed—that is, our leadership failed—to comprehend this Indochina struggle as one campaign or sub-war in a global conflict. Since we did not set it within its global frame of reference, our leaders could neither develop a comprehensive strategy to win it nor make it comprehensible to the American people.”

Chuck Schumer is in a spirited mood. “This is going to be one of the biggest fights of the next three, four months,” the Senate minority leader said recently of the coming debate over tax cuts. “And Democrats are ready for it.”

“My original instinct was to pull out” of Afghanistan, President Trump said this week. “But all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office; in other words, when you’re president of the United States.”

On July 18, 2015, about a month into his long-shot campaign for president, Donald Trump famously attacked John McCain. “He’s not a war hero,” he said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Campaigning in Iowa that summer, Trump mocked Jeb Bush for being “low-energy.” In February 2016, Trump said Bush’s brother, the forty-third president, had lied in order to invade Iraq. When Mitt Romney attacked Trump the following month, Trump responded by calling the 2012 Republican nominee a “choke artist.” On his path to the 2016 GOP nomination and then the presidency, Donald Trump positioned himself at odds with the leadership of the party he sought to command.

I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching a course on the history of the conservative intellectual movement for the Hertog political studies program. This is the second year Hertog has offered the course, but the first time under President Trump. I like to think I offered the students, all of whom were intelligent, well spoken, and impressive, a complete story. There was a beginning and middle

I don’t think I’ve ever read a presidential interview quite like the one Donald Trump gave to the New York Times yesterday. Going over the transcript, there were times when I thought I was reading a David Mamet play. (You can read the full thing here.)

The other day Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania explained why Republicans are having such trouble with health care. Speaking at a town hall during the July 4 recess, Toomey said, “I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win. I think most of my colleagues didn’t. So we didn’t expect to be in this situation.”

President Trump delivered one of the most important speeches of his young presidency on Thursday. Billed as “Remarks to the people of Poland,” the address was as clear a statement as we have heard of Trump’s nation-state populism. This philosophy, which differs in emphasis and approach from that of other post-Cold War Republican presidents, is both enduring and undefined.